Jay Ives, KI4TXP of Leesburg, and I arrived on site at the Cornwall Campus of Loudoun Hospital in Leesburg about 0700 hours and "commandeer-ed" a picnic table located just off the Emergency Room Ambulance Entrance to use as our base of operations.

      We relocated the table to a more advantageous location and setup our equipment for the exercise. We were able to quickly raise our 2M ground plane antenna to about 7 meters using my bag of sectional mast pieces and we established good communications with Bill Frisbie, W3EMH of Sterling, at Loudoun Hospital - Lansdowne and Denny Boehler, KF4TJI of Leesburg, and Tom Dawson, WB3AKD of Round Hill, at the Dulles International Airport emergency exercise site. Around this time, we were joined by Chuck Graham, KI4IEO of Leesburg.

      Just as the exercise got started, we were surprised by a change of the net control frequency from 2M to 70cm. We had not foreseen this unexpected shift but between Jay, Chuck and myself, we were able to quickly overcome this obstacle and, using a mag-mount dual-band mobile antenna, return to the net on frequency although probably not with the same strength of signal that had been enjoyed on 2 meters.

      After checking in our "casualties" arriving from the emergency exercise, our walking "wounded" re-boarded the bus for their transport back to the exercise crash site and we checked out of the net, dismantled our station and returned the picnic table to is previous location.

      Best Regards, Bill McCourt - WF1L of Reston, Virginia